State by State

by Matt Weiland

  Due to my parents’ beliefs, whenever and wherever they do die, they will not be buried in Rhode Island soil. The house in Rolling Acres will belong to other people; there will be no place there to pay my respects. At the risk of predicting the future, I can see myself, many years from now, driving up I-95, on my way to another vacation on the Cape. We will cross the border after Connecticut, turn off at exit 3A for Kingston, and then continue along an alternative, prettier route that will take us across Jamestown and over the Newport Bridge, where the sapphire bay spreads out on either side, a breathtaking sight that will never grow old. There will no longer be a reason to break the journey in Little Rest. Like many others, we will pass through without stopping.

  SOUTH CAROLINA

  CAPITAL Columbia

  ENTERED UNION 1788 (8th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME In honor of Charles I of England

  NICKNAME Palmetto State

  MOTTO Animis opibusque parati (“Prepared in mind and resources”) and Dum spiro spero (“While I breathe, I hope”)

  RESIDENTS South Carolinian

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 6

  STATE BIRD Carolina wren

  STATE FLOWER Carolina yellow jessamine

  STATE TREE palmetto tree

  STATE SONG “Carolina”

  LAND AREA 30,109 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Richland Co., 13 mi. SE of Columbia

  POPULATION 4,255,083

  WHITE 67.2%

  BLACK 29.5%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%

  ASIAN 0.9%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 2.4%

  UNDER 18 25.2%

  65 AND OVER 12.1%

  MEDIAN AGE 35.4

  SOUTH CAROLINA

  Jack Hitt

  When South Carolinians proposed to separate from the United States in December 1860, a state legislator named James Louis Petigru vehemently opposed the idea. As the story goes—and it’s a story every South Carolinian can tell you—Petigru rose to his feet and declared that he opposed secession because “South Carolina was too small to be a sovereign nation, and too large to be an insane asylum.”

  South Carolinians love that story because no other anecdote quite captures our easy rage, china-shop recklessness, and merry eccentricity. That we tell the Petigru story acknowledges that there was something profoundly idiotic about starting the war, but here’s the key part: We did it anyway. Other states may be halfway between the East Coast and the West, or halfway between biggest and smaller. Ours is halfway between freedom and insanity.

  I was born and raised in South Carolina. At times, I have lived in California and Oregon, Spain, New York, and Connecticut, but none of those places ever quite got its claws in me. I return to the family homestead two or three times a year because it’s impossible not to. Like Petigru, I’m fond of the location. There’s a lot of “there” there, which is saying something, state-wise. Most states aren’t places as much as they are political compromises or tourism slogans. Most people passionately claim their cities and patriotically claim their country. But their state?

  The reason Gertrude Stein’s famous insult works—“There is no there there”—is because she said it about a city. (Oakland.) Who’d really get upset if she’d said it about a state? Cities are supposed to possess lots of “there” because they are communities where everybody else is just down the street. At the other end of the telescope are nations, defined by Olympian matters of geography—continents, crescent valleys, archipelagos—whose identities were forged long ago, usually in blood.

  States were typically born out of a minor occasion that is remembered only by some amateur historian, usually a guy at the public library (or owner of an antiques store) who self-publishes an unreadably earnest account of state lore. States tend to be matters of property law, borders that are either Euclidean lines etched across the landscape by a frontier surveyor whose name escapes me right now (check with the local historian, he’ll know). Or, the border is a squiggly line that follows the bank of a major waterway where, once upon a time, it seemed logical to set a border since all the people who lived across the river were funny looking, and unwashed, and spoke in unpleasantly guttural grunts, and whose women were alluringly promiscuous, and whose menfolk all possessed comically small or terrifyingly large penises, depending.

  For the longest time, states made no sense whatsoever, and few could really care. We still don’t quite know what state Andrew Jackson can claim as his birthplace—both North and South Carolina have a say in this—because it’s not altogether certain just where the line ran through the Waxhaw Settlement when his mother had him in 1767.

  Then we had the War Between the States, and suddenly states mattered a great deal. And, in time, each of them accrued a kind of character. Most states can sum up their identity in an official slogan or a bumper sticker. Don’t expect to find “I ♥ South Carolina” plastered on too many cars when you’re driving through. The feelings run a bit deeper than Chamber of Commerce marketing. The state’s identity is a long story—actually a lot of short stories, like the Petigru one. These are mostly old stories that every card-carrying South Carolinian knows how to tell, although a few new disturbing ones have recently been added to the playlist.

  Here’s another one. It concerns the famous remark made by some distant orator from North Carolina. Apparently he rose to speak (everybody rose to speak back then; they had no talk-show sofas). And he identified himself as a citizen of North Carolina—“that vale of humility located between two mountains of conceit.” Anyone reared in the southeast of America knows he was referring to the twin peaks of southern gentry: Virginia and South Carolina.

  And this is where it gets interesting because Virginia may be seen as a vast swath of aristocracy, but no one thinks of South Carolina that way. They think of red-necks from Spartanburg, inbreds from the Piedmont, pig-biters from Edgefield County, the redbones of Sumter County, or hillbillies scattered among the hills rotting out their brains on lead-tainted moonshine.

  Right. The aristocracy in South Carolina was more confined, to the “Lowcountry” specifically, or more accurately, Charleston, or to get right down to it, downtown Charleston south of Broad Street. Which is where I grew up.

  South Carolina is a high-strung place, born of the tension between one arrogant, scornful, haughty, supercilious, snooty, proud, puffed-up, peacock of a town—Charleston—and the rest of the state. This tension defines almost everything in the state and manifests itself in every aspect of life there, even geography. There is the Lowcountry and there is the Piedmont.

  If South Carolina often told the rest of the country to get lost, then Charleston just as often had the same message for the rest of South Carolina.

  James Louis Petigru? Charlestonian.

  Charlestonians feel, in a measure far exceeding any other town except for maybe Rome, that their ancestry and birth is a glorious gift from God. They like to say that the two rivers that shape the peninsula of downtown Charleston—the Ashley and the Cooper—“come together to form the Atlantic Ocean.”

  Here’s another story you always hear. An old man whose parents brought him to Charleston as an infant had spent his entire, long life there. He’d gone to the local school with the other boys. As an adult, he served on the vestry at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and headed a named law firm on Broad Street. He was a member of the Carolina Yacht Club and joined all the right Charleston societies. When he finally died, the town folks buried him among the most prestigious plots at St. Philip’s and on his gravestone it listed all his local achievements and then concluded, “We miss him as one of our own.”

  Charleston always strained to draw a sharp line between the aristocrats and the hicks, or in the old language, the bourbons and the red-necks. The upstate had hoedowns; Charleston had the St. Cecilia Society, a club devoted (technically) to the love of classical music. Charleston hosted sailboat regattas; the upstate held drag races. Charlestonians traveled in Packards, then Cadillacs, then BMWs, while the Piedmont folks drove j
acked-up rattletrap trucks to the NASCAR races at the Darlington 500.

  When I was growing up, no one ever flew the provocative battle flag of the Confederacy in Charleston. This had nothing to do with anyone’s Petigru-esque thoughts on the war; any gentleman downtown could discourse on battlefield valor in the “Late Unpleasantness” until your head exploded. But the battle flag? That was white trash.

  I visited an old Charlestonian friend once at his country house and his parents also drove in from downtown for a big cookout. He had the Confederate flag flying off his porch, and he tried out the new “heritage not hate” line. But his mother protested that he should take it down. For her, all that in-your-face Confederate stuff was just too vulgar, too red-necky.

  Upstate South Carolinians speak in the rural twang made famous by Gomer Pyle and the man-rapers of Deliverance. Charlestonians spoke Charlestonese, which is heavily influenced by the African-American speech known as Gullah—a musical way of talking in which the speaker chews up and swallows most of a word while lingering lyrically over the occasional interesting vowel.

  The split falls along religious lines, too. Upstate was Baptist and involved a lot of church-going while the Lowcountry was predominantly Episcopalian and considered attendance at Easter and Christmas just fine. Charlestonians had long ago ceded all the adult responsibility to the upstate. The Baptists wanted all the moral outrage and preachers’ fury? Fine. They could have it. And they could have all the political posturing, too. Some 200 years ago, when Charleston was the state capital, they kicked out the politicians and sent them to the geometric center of the state, Columbia, a town ridiculed then as the middle of nowhere and despite the influx of nearly 120,000 people in the intervening two centuries still described that way in Charleston.

  The upstate was H. L. Mencken’s notorious “Sahara of the Bozart,” an endless chain of speedtrap parishes with economies gone bust a century ago. The mills closed down and nothing came to replace them. In the century of desolation to follow, the local Baptist ministers convinced their neighbors that this ruination had nothing to do with themselves, but rather the Jews and “the Negro.” Nowadays, the more enlightened preachers are hip enough to pin it on the “Hollywood liberals” and “inner-city welfare queens.”

  Plus ça change.

  As the moral fundamentalists wailed from pulpits all across the upstate, Charlestonians merrily wallowed in being dismissed as Whiskeypalians. They loved it that the blue noses freaked out, learning about our private drinking societies, speakeasy bars, or the annual Rockville Regatta—a boat race so notorious for its decadent onshore parties that the one sure mark of being a naïve outsider was showing up with a sailboat. Yet with all these differences, here is the one truth every Charlestonian knew: Eventually, the most adventurous of those Baptists would find an excuse to come downtown—to drink our liquor, smoke our cigarettes, and dance with our debutantes.

  One of those hicks was my father. A beanpole of a kid from a dusty podunk called Bamberg, my father attended The Citadel, the local military college. He mastered cotillion dancing in the arms of a downtown belle who also introduced him into the pleasures of drinking and smoking, and later bore him five children, the last of whom is now telling you this story.

  What has kept our peninsula of mutual self-congratulation so splendidly isolated and cocksure is, oddly, architecture. If you’ve been there, you know that Charleston is a little village of antebellum houses. We don’t have mighty mansions of the Newport variety. One of the biggest houses we have—the Calhoun Mansion, as it’s called—is hardly impressive by mansion standards. Charleston’s physical beauty comes from being an entire collection of modest, lovely things. Street after street of regular residences with side piazzas and old longleaf pine clapboarding painted so many times that south of Broad is a fusion of antique textures, mottled bricks, tilted walls, comfortably settled foundations, sagging shutters, rusting earthquake rods, and shimmering old panes of glass. I always tell visitors to Charleston to skip the tours and the official nonsense. Just fix a cocktail (a traveler, the old folks called them) around 4 p.m. on a sunny afternoon and head off down the streets amid the light of the setting sun angling in and around the warm lived-in-ness of our snug alleys.

  The classic Charleston dwelling is called a single house. On the street, it is one room wide and then retreats backward—a series of rooms stacked one after the other like a railroad flat, often an unlikely number of them. The story goes that property taxes were once configured according to how much house fronted the street. So the city quickly became populated by these tall lanky houses that sidled up to the street like a man cocked sideways at a bar. The town possesses a public sense with its privacy tantalizingly just out of view. The houses might face out, acknowledging the exterior world, but keep a strong sense that what is really happening lies hidden behind a blaze of azaleas, ginkgos, and massive live oaks.

  The other quality of Charleston’s architecture that perpetuated its beauty was disaster. After the American Revolution, Charleston never had enough money to fix the town up, tear the old places down, and build gleaming new ones. Historically, Charleston and Boston were very similar towns, sister towns. In the storied, distant past, they were both port cities that traded visiting debutantes and brides for grooms and otherwise kept an easy exchange of money and goods and ideas. As Charlestonians love to tell you, there was a Charleston Tea Party, too.

  Then Boston expanded and eventually luxuriated in the Industrial Revolution and ditched much of its colonial architecture for the next new style until they tore down that one and then on into the present day of gleaming office towers, downtown malls, and Boston’s City Hall, a massive concrete puck of eye-averting brutalist density. Charleston was stuck with itself and never really got on her feet. Every time it looked like prosperity might be coming, some new disaster struck. It might be the War of 1812, the Panic of 1819, the Great Fire of 1838, the Civil War blockade of 1862–65, Reconstruction, the Great Earthquake of 1886, the Panic of 1893, World War I, the Depression, World War II, or Hurricane Gracie in 1958. Whatever it was, it seemed as if every generation, circumstances forced us back into our old houses—broke once again but willing to make do with the only claim to greatness always within reach. Ourselves.

  Like so much Southern aristocracy, Charleston’s was mostly myth. Few families downtown had any money. So we turned that embarrassing detail into a point of pride. My mother would sometimes take note of some Charlestonian who was “wealthy enough to have a maid out front polishing the brass door-knocker but too poor to put food on the table.” I was almost out of high school before I realized that my widowed mother and I were pretty much two of those Charlestonians.

  The city’s arrogance emerged organically long ago as a bulwark against the town’s persistent poverty, tough times, and just bad luck. In the days of everyone’s great-grandparents, the attitude was, we might not have money, and we might live in these ratty old houses, and we might actually be poor and we might live next door to a black person (or secretly be a black person), but we are Charlestonians, okay? And you’re not.

  I say ratty old houses because the pride Charlestonians take in that old architecture downtown is of fairly recent vintage. Most of our history we shamefully patched up the old places after the latest fire/hurricane/earthquake/depression/war. The preservationist surge that developed in Charleston occurred in the mid-twentieth century. And what saved a great deal of the beautiful antebellum architecture from destruction was—I am proud to report—the vulgarity of my great-grandfather, Walter Pringle. He lived in one of the premier houses downtown in those days, the Col. John Stuart house on the corner of Tradd and Orange. It is the house where, it is said, the revolutionary war hero Francis Marion (“The Swamp Fox”) escaped a British raid by leaping out a second-floor window, breaking his ankle on the ground, and running off anyway.

  Walter, or Fardee, as the family called him, lost most of his wealth in the Depression. His wife never again left the house for a
social occasion—paralyzed by the shame of not being able to reciprocate the invitation. Then, one day, a Yankee museum of American “interiors” offered him a dollop of money for the drawing room of his house—the floor boards, the moldings, the fireplace, etc. It was enough that he could rebuild the room with suitable reproductions and have a comfortable sum left over, so he took the deal.

  One day, in came the Yankees to pry up the floorboards and take down the walls to the structural foundations. When the elegant ladies downtown found out that crazy Walter (he looked like a bantam-sized version of Colonel Sanders) was selling off the city’s treasures and doing so by practically reenacting a kind of Shermanesque violation of the town, they freaked out. According to family lore, the group founded by these ladies—the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings—pushed for a zoning ordinance (which passed) declaring some 4,800 houses and 138 acres of the Charleston’s peninsula to be forever afterward an “Old and Historic District.”

  I went hunting for this room, and sure enough, you can visit my greatgrandfather’s notorious drawing room online nowadays. It’s funny because when I was growing up the aunt of many of my friends, Francis Edmunds, ran a similar outfit, the Historic Charleston Foundation. (The city is clotted with such 501(c)(3)s these days.) She always treated me with a kind of cautious distance, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I wondered if Francis probably didn’t see me as irredeemably tainted by my great-grandfather’s original sin. This is how Charleston works. As the great man said, the past is not even past.